this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
38 points (89.6% liked)
chat
8636 readers
142 users here now
Chat is a text only community for casual conversation, please keep shitposting to the absolute minimum. This is intended to be a separate space from c/chapotraphouse or the daily megathread. Chat does this by being a long-form community where topics will remain from day to day unlike the megathread, and it is distinct from c/chapotraphouse in that we ask you to engage in this community in a genuine way. Please keep shitposting, bits, and irony to a minimum.
As with all communities posts need to abide by the code of conduct, additionally moderators will remove any posts or comments deemed to be inappropriate.
Thank you and happy chatting!
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The maximalist "anything using any kind of neural network math is exactly the same and is equally bad in all cases" position is nonsensical and feels like people just taking out the frustration they feel towards being unable to stop the actually destructive and bad things (the mass rollout of useless and catastrophically wasteful datacenters, companies trying to replace workers with glorified magic 8-balls that make everything worse, vibe coding speedrunning the complete collapse of the systems and infrastructure modern society depends on) by conflating them with and raging against legitimate use cases (bespoke data processing models trained for specific scientific tasks, or making certain extant techs like text-to-speech or machine translation a little less shit than they were before even if they're still not great) or harmless hobbyist stuff that's at worst kind of cringe and/or annoying (people playing with open source local models, who sometimes spam the worthless output in much the same people who just discovered poser or daz spammed the worst CGI renders you've ever seen everywhere starting in the mid 00s).
It feels kind of like if someone kept hearing about how bad "drones" (remote control military weapons) are and decided to wage a protracted peoples war against the local amateur battlebots scene because they didn't understand that these are complete different things.
In my day to day job as an engineer I use LLMs to help me do my work. They are tools just like anything else and enable me to work faster. I've even piloted an agent flow that takes our existing site (a huge behemoth of legacy and new services) and automatically performs accessibility testing across a variety of tools then gives us reports. We have actioned these to actively improve the experience of people using our product with screenreaders for instance (and have confirmed this from these very same people giving us feedback on the changes). The view that they are useless runs counter to reality and in my experience is usually from people who have deep emotional hate of technology. LLMs have incredible potential but as with anything under Capitalism they are used for horrors and their rollout is done with complete distain for human life and the environment. That is not special to AI.